holding-Post

I was trying to think of a clever title so I wrote 'Holding Post' and then looked for ages of pictures of me holding a post at the adventure playground but couldn't find one as I take all the pictures.  On Monday, I went to a conference called the Failure of Participation in Edinburgh.  It was a trek.  I booked it a couple of months ago when I was feeling a lack of structure in my life, a need to fill the tumble weed nature of my dairy. At the back of my mind I am bothered by my encounter with and resistance to a link with what is called 'social practice' and in its more expansive form 'participatory practice';  I feel uncomfortable with it.

One of the things we say in our work as Poly-technic is that we are artists in the world not the art world.  We say this as we are not working in a given validated tradition - we do not follow Arthur Danto's notion of an institutionally formed definition of art, we see art as part of life and in turn life as part of art.  This assertion is fundamentally ontological - what is art?  In this way it moves us on from the circular question of whether something is or isn't art - we leapfrog this binary as it doesn't really matter to us if it is or it isn't.  The greatest problem of relational practice is Reification  a difficult word for me to spell but it sort of means turning the abstract into the real - here I use it to refer to a way of thinking about art that turns everything into its object.  This is why some social artists can speak of people as the material of their practice.  Joseph Beuys coined the phrase social sculpture but I think he wasn't carving artwork out of the social space to be authored by him as author, the comment was more that every aspect of social space can be felt as art.  Essentially utopian, Beuys offers us a totalising approach to art and life where neither is the raw material for the other.  Somewhere social arts or the social turn forgot this and tried to paint pictures with people rather than pictures of people and most people were not bothered.

It's not easy to pull these concerns with the failure of participation together in relation to my PhD but the fields are entwined.  Yesterday I was actually helping to make a planter with my friends at the adventure playground. I was also doing a PhD but this cannot be counted as I do not yet have ethical approval confirmed through the online ethical approval system. From an ontological position of what constitutes research the fact my research has to start and stop in relation to the systems of the university reminds me a little of Danto's ideas of the internal validation and indeed establishing the category of art as a distinct category.  I am also doing a relational, participatory social art work funded through Arts Council England around the notion of assemblage and sculpture.  Where I sit though with an expanded view of the event from Massumi  and the agencement rather than the slightly less animated translation to assemblage from Deleuze and Gattarri it is impossible to extract any element of anything that I am currently working on from what I could call the plain of immanence but would rather call everything else.  This totalising way of thinking about the world is very seductive, it does not allow for edges of territory, words like transversal, plane, immanence and affect and phantasm all deny metaphysics but in the trope of metaphysical thinking. 

I have never really bought into the social turn I don't like making people into objects and I don't think that, socially speaking, art provides good value for money in terms of delivering social change.  The failure of participation is not my failure, but I enjoyed the conference.  If a bigger failure came to light I think it is possibly art's problem with over-egging the pudding.  Essentially artists and people involved in promoting the arts make too grand a claim - art aspires for things it is unable to achieve.  This is more than ambitions and aspiration and endeavour, it is blatant self-aggrandisement and a deceit.   The transformative power of the arts always neglects to consider what is being transformed into what; for example, sad people into happy people?  People who present a risk into people who are no risk?  The fat into the thin and the thick into the clever?  The failure at the heart of things feels like the people who want art to be seen as useless and for its own sake, autotelic to use a more academic term, also want it to have enormous agency.  There is a contradiction at the heart of things and in the hearts of people. It is lucky that most of us don't care.

Where are we going then in this discussion and what are the positives and the relevance to the ontology of my research?  I use ontology here as a stand-in for, Why does my PhD research exist? I think I have something to say about the edges of things and that's where the reading is drawing me.  I feel that the edges of disciplines and the edges of the world are talked about a lot but rarely articulated well through any knowledge producing practice.  There is lots of work about the liminal and the edge-lands and the spaces between. There is also lots of work about totalising ways of thinking.  So far in my reading this all comes through Hegal's Dialectics through to Deleuze and The Plane of Immanence through to the salt and peppering of the Singularity; a bit of Doreen Massey and her conceptualisation of space, Massumi and the Event and mostly everything that mentions any type of omnipotent and present God thing.

I like this messy post, it is a bitty and scruffy bit of writing and notes but somewhere in it when I look back in the future I will see a struggle that at a later point I will work through better - it is a good mess of a holding post that requires a screen print to finish on.